Popular Russian footwear chain, ZENDEN Group, deployed Oracle Retail to drive inventory productivity and elevate the customer experience with better inventory placement. Today, ZENDEN leads the Russian footwear market on profit per square meter, engaging about 3 million loyalty cardholders and having more than 74.4 million people visiting its stores. In the last five years, ZENDEN has sold 42 million pairs of shoes. With Oracle Retail, ZENDEN Group shifted from a manual planning process to adopt automated demand-driven assortment planning. The new process helps to ensure the right shoes are always in stock for its customers.
"With the rapid growth of the brand, we required a modern solution that could optimize the process, of forecasting and planning assortment. For us, those were the most important factors which have influenced our decision. The new Oracle Retail solution provides the common environment for all participants of the process and also allows us to make the top-down and bottom-up plans," said Vitaly Fomin, project director, ZENDEN Group. "Due to high accuracy and the new forecasting tool which uses machine learning, we can more effectively meet consumer demand in our stores by providing better assortment availability. In the long-term this helps to reduce the volume of clearances and to increase the overall margin of the business."
"Before the implementation, our team was responsible for shipments into over 400 stores that we managed through a highly manual and time-consuming process with using big and unsynchronized spreadsheets. Now we have a universal solution with a single user interface and seamless automation of our best practices, which gives us the capacity to think more strategically," said Victoria Rakhimzhanova, planning department director, ZENDEN Group.
With Oracle Retail, the teams have standardized 90 percent of the planning process in one central system. ZENDEN Group implemented assortment planning solution, Oracle Retail Assortment Planning; demand forecasting solution, Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting; and Veltio's new Product Forecasting on the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server platform. Veltio, a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), provided Implementation services on the project.
"In our recent global consumer research showed that it's no longer good enough for retailers to simply sell products. Retailers need to get better at acquiring the right customers and placing assortment and inventory where the customer expects to engage with the brand," said Mike Webster, senior vice president, and general manager, Oracle Retail. "By leveraging the machine learning embedded in our Planning and Optimization solutions, ZENDEN gains a single view of the assortment and can now orchestrate the supply chain to continue to drive margin and reduce costs."
